How the Cuban Boxing Blueprint Helped Shape India’s Golden Generation

It is now a quarter century since Dr Alcides Sagarra retired as coach of Cuba’s boxing team. By then, Cuba had won 32 Olympic boxing gold medals, including a record seven at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. The years that followed may not have been quite as successful, although Cuba once again topped the Olympic boxing medal table at the Covid-delayed Tokyo Games in 2021. But Sagarra did far more than make Cuban amateur boxing the gold standard. He produced a generation of coaches who carried that philosophy across the world, including to India.

At a time when hopes of an Olympic boxing medal were barely a dot on India’s sporting horizon, the late Aspy Adajania took a group of junior boxers to Havana in the early 1990s. Sagarra was at the peak of his powers, and one of the young coaches working with the Indian boxers was Blas Fernández. Before long, Fernández travelled to India and helped establish a programme that is now the envy of boxing nations around the world.

It is no surprise that the seeds of this transformation took root most strongly in Bhiwani, rural Haryana. Cuban boxing, much like Cuban baseball, has always thrived on an ‘us against the world’ mentality and an extraordinary sense of community. That same spirit already existed in Bhiwani, thanks to the pioneering achievements of the late Hawa Singh, who won Asian Games gold medals in 1966 and 1970. Combined with technical inputs from the Cuban coaching system, the local programme grew stronger year after year.

India’s women were virtually unstoppable in the Commonwealth Games boxing competition, winning five gold medals and one silver. Only Praveen Hooda failed to return with a medal, losing to the eventual champion. It was not just the medals that impressed, but the manner in which the Indians fought. Their performances came straight out of the Cuban amateur boxing playbook.

Most of the Indian boxers were exceptionally light on their feet, blisteringly quick with their combinations and remarkably composed while evading their opponents’ attacks. They moved around the ring with confidence, picking up points almost at will, with crisp jabs landing with remarkable consistency. Even when forced into close-range exchanges, the Indians more than held their own, using sharp body shots and uppercuts to great effect. The word that best described their performances was clinical – the very adjective once routinely used to describe Cuban boxing in its golden era.

There is a gym in Old Havana named after Rafael Trejo that has produced more Olympic medallists than most countries can dream of, despite possessing only the most basic facilities. Many of the youngsters who train there perform hundreds of push-ups every day while wearing borrowed shoes with worn-out soles. Yet that never stops them from completing their punching drills, skipping sessions and every exercise demanded of them. Discipline and an unwavering commitment to improvement define the Cuban system.

That same discipline and single-mindedness have now been instilled in India’s young boxers. Pioneers such as Hawa Singh, Venkatesh Devarajan, Vijender Singh and Mary Kom showed the way, but this current crop has benefited from a robust system that previous generations simply did not possess.

The ability to transport the essence of Havana’s boxing culture to a remote corner of northern India may well rank among Indian sport’s greatest achievements.

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